As highly automated driving is transitioning from single-vehicle closed-access testing to commercial deployments of public ride-hailing in selected areas (e.g., Waymo), automated driving and connected cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) remain active fields of research. Even though simulation is omnipresent in the development and validation life cycle of automated and connected driving technology, the complex nature of public road traffic and software that masters it still requires real-world integration and testing with actual vehicles. Dedicated vehicles for research and development allow testing and validation of software and hardware components under real-world conditions early on. They also enable collecting and publishing real-world datasets that let others conduct research without vehicle access, and support early demonstration of futuristic use cases. In this paper, we present karl., our new research vehicle for automated and connected driving. Apart from major corporations, few institutions worldwide have access to their own L4-capable research vehicles, restricting their ability to carry out independent research. This paper aims to help bridge that gap by sharing the reasoning, design choices, and technical details that went into making karl. a flexible and powerful platform for research, engineering, and validation in the context of automated and connected driving. More impressions of karl. are available at https://karl.ac.

翻译：随着高度自动驾驶正从单车封闭测试向特定区域（如Waymo）的公共网约车商业部署过渡，自动驾驶与网联协同智能交通系统（C-ITS）仍是活跃的研究领域。尽管仿真技术在自动驾驶与网联驾驶技术的开发与验证生命周期中无处不在，但公共道路交通及其控制软件的复杂性仍需要在真实环境中进行实车集成与测试。专用于研发的车辆可支持在早期阶段于真实条件下对软硬件组件进行测试验证，同时能够收集并发布真实世界数据集，使其他研究者无需实车即可开展研究，并支持对未来应用场景进行早期演示。本文介绍了我们用于自动驾驶与网联驾驶的新型研究平台karl.。除大型企业外，全球仅有少数机构拥有具备L4级能力的自有研究车辆，这限制了其开展独立研究的能力。本文通过分享构建karl.平台的设计思路、技术选型与工程细节，旨在帮助弥合这一差距，使其成为自动驾驶与网联驾驶领域兼具灵活性与强大功能的研究、工程与验证平台。更多关于karl.的展示可访问https://karl.ac。